Liberal Democracies and Human Rights Violations

Throughout the semester in this class, there has been much information read and posted about human rights violations in the lesser developed, less liberal regions of the world. Citizens in many nations today still suffer many abuses, from female genital mutilation still being somewhat widespread across Africa, to prisoner abuses in Zambia, and forcible relocation of the homeless, poor, and suspected thieves of Rwandan society to an Alcatraz-like island facility where they can be "rehabilitated." Many nations have also tried to outlaw homosexuality, making this lifestyle punishable by arrest or even death. And nations such as Iran and Rwanda have put down political dissent, showing no tolerance for differing opinion and (in the case of the former) attacked and killed their own citizens.

But there have also been detailed abuses of human rights, even in countries that are fully fledged liberal democracies and therefore should not be doing such things. The persecution and violence against GLBT people in the United States is more common than might be believed, and frequently done by police officers, members of society who are supposed to uphold the law and safety of citizens rather than trample them. Police-initiated brutality against GLBT people make up only two to four percent of reported incidents, but in reality, constitute at least 40 percent of police-initiated violence incidents (Amnesty International). Abuses by U.S. soldiers against prisoners captured in Iraq and Afghanistan is also well known, due to incidents at Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib scandal, among others. And the recent Arizona immigration bill allows for much more strict policies against illegal immigration from Mexico. Law enforcement can stop a Latino person if the officer simply suspects that the person is in the state illegally, which raises fears that this new law could lead to racial profiling.

The United States is certainly not the only guilty liberal democracy of violating human rights in this day and age. Multiple countries in Europe are moving to repress and restrict aspects of Islam. France and Belgium are both deciding upon measures that would ban the Islamic burqa in public venues. While leadership here believes the burqa is an "attack on women's rights," the banning of a cultural practice of Islam is in turn an attack on the right to religious freedom, criminalizing a practice that, while controversial, does not pose any direct, hostile threat to people or to society (Crumley). Switzerland has taken a slightly different direction, but one that is no less alarming, as the country has passed laws by popular vote that prohibit the building of minarets. Normally a country known and renowned for its tolerance and neutrality, the Swiss citizens have somehow decided that increasing the number of minarets is intolerable (with only a small amount of them existing currently) and is something that represents a threat to their national identity (Altikriti).

Many dictatorships and fledgling/illiberal democracies around the world take a lot of heat for human rights abuses, and rightfully so, as many terrible things do occur under such regimes. But shouldn't liberal democracies who point out these abuses look to themselves for these things, as well? Even liberal democracies, it seems, are not immune to intolerance and can use elements of its democracy to trample human rights when it sees fit. The minaret ban in Switzerland, for instance, was done by popular referendum, getting the support of 57% of the voter turnout (Altikriti). It is often the case that Western liberal democracies champion human rights and press less powerful, less developed nations around the world to change their practices and actions in order to respect these rights. But what happens when these Western liberal democracies fail to practice what they preach? Who is to enforce or dictate the upholding of human rights on these nations when they violate them, sometimes quite flagrantly?

While it is true that international groups and other countries can point out these abuses and try to hold Western liberal democracies accountable, the Western liberal democracies must ultimately hold themselves accountable and address these issues from within. Political tolerance of outgroups is something that still needs to be encouraged and practiced. If different groups are understood to not be a threat to the current society and lifestyle, negativity and suppression are likely to decrease as a result. And while there is no real power of its enforcement over any country, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is still something to be closely adhered to, as even these liberal democracies seem to have forgotten some of its tenets. At the very least, if these issues cannot be fixed, it would help the liberal democracies to save face to try and address them, since nobody likes listening to a hypocrite. The fact that a nation might be a liberal democracy is not a guarantee that human rights violations will not be perpetrated by these countries, which is something that must be observed and heeded by all liberal democracies.

Works Cited:

Altikriti, Anas. "Minarets and Europe's Crisis." 2 Dec 2009 (aljazeera.net).

Amnesty International USA. Stonewalled. New York: Amnesty International Publications, 2005 (http://www.amnestyusa.org/outfront/stonewalled/report.pdf).

Crumley, Bruce. "France moves closer to banning the burqa." 23 Apr 2010 (http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100423/wl_time/08599198387100).